“If there had been 15 more people in that queue, someone would have died”, is an interesting epithet with which to begin a club review, but in this momentous Bridge Thursday, it is the most true. Sweaty crushes, over 1000 tickets sold (and thus pitchers, jagerbombs, and drunken forgotten chat aplenty) and an overall organisational disaster that meant this Bridge might would live on in people’s memories (and not necessarily in a good way). Although supposedly Varsity themed, there was little evidence of this—the open pistes of the Alps seemed worlds away from the efforts by many to squash past one another to the space and air of the smoking area.
Of course, this too ended a futile endeavour, as this air was clogged with rising translucent clouds of smoke. This was to be expected in the smoking area, but was not to be expected was the sheer quantity of people present. Bridge capacity is 1200. 1500 people turned up at 10:30. 800 people were already inside. These kinds of numbers are almost unprecedented— proceeding largely from an aggressive campaign run by the reps and an underestimation of how many tickets were actually sold. Who could have possibly foreseen the popularity of a Thursday night in Oxford’s most famous club…
This isn’t to say that it was necessarily a total disaster—by all accounts it was actually quite fun for all of those lucky enough to make it in. In addition, it’s hard for Bridge Thursday to ever be exactly bad—the intrinsically social aspect of catching up with a rather random collection of people you know is always going to be fun. Just this week; it came with the risk of being crushed. Perhaps a rethink on ticketing is required.
